More on Sexism in Video Games
By: Ross

I was watching a cover story about movies and entertainment in general, and they started talking about the Tomb Raider movie. When showing some shots of one of the Tomb Raider games, a caption read, "Lara Croft is the first female to star in a video game". These people have not done their homework. Not only is that not true, true gamers will also say "the Tomb Raider games are computer games! not video games", but that's not the issue I'll be talking about.

It got me wondering though, who was the first female in a video/computer/arcade game? My first thoughts turned to Samus from Metroid, see that was downright cool; letting you in on the fact she's a woman at the end of the game. My conclusion however was that Mrs.Pac-Man was likely the first female in an electronic game.

Getting to the dirt, the stuff you came to read... that those terrible people in the video game industry are sexist! Well, that's kind of an interesting way to look at it. Since this is a Nintendo site, and for all purposes I'll tell you a bit about the "sexism" at Nintendo; In Japan only men worked at the company as far as I know, from making playing cards to toy shooting galleries to video games. Same thing when Nintendo of America started, the first woman to work was Mrs. Arakawa (you should know she's the wife of the president of NOA, and daughter of the president of Nintendo of Japan), and the second woman to work at Nintendo of America was a woman in charge of advertising. You will note something of a pattern (which still exists today), that while slowly many women became a part of Nintendo, men largely make up the company (especially game programmers and designers!). There's nothing sinister about it, few women actually came to Nintendo looking for jobs (infact, most of the first women at Nintendo were sought out for their expertise). Sure it would be nice if more women worked at Nintendo, and I'm sure if a woman came to Nintendo and was more qualified (even by just a bit) than a man she'd get the job.

The cause of Nintendo having few women was/is not their fault. It's more the fault of society when it used (it still does sometimes today) to say that "women should stay home in the kitchen" etc. Women were to stay home, and "computer programming" is serious stuff that you should take many years at college to get proper degrees. People who could program computers in the early eighties were a select few, so the number of women who could do that were even a smaller number. And the number of programmers that thought video and computer games should be taken seriously, or could make money, were the smallest group. It's not unlikely that with so few people into the concept of video gaming that the few women programmers never got a chance to talk to the guys who were working at an old warehouse in New York with a sign that read "Nintendo".

Back to actual sexism IN the video games. It's kind of natural the way it happened really; if you work only with guys, and you're a "nerdy" programmer, the thought of women probably doesn't enter your head for most of the day (I'm not exaggerating). And it should be pointed out the minimum of input into creative stories for video games; especially liscenses of Nintendo I believe made levels of video games and then had to decide a story to go with it, a "save the princess" story usually worked best. The Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda games atleast had the damsels having magic powers. You know the Koopa Kids in Super Mario Bros. 3? They were all based on different people who worked at Nintendo changed into Koopa monsters. Notice there's only one girl, Wendy. Now that's the best example of direct input into the games from people who worked at Nintendo.

Has this whole situation gotten better? Not by much. In every RPG you'll see there's usually two female characters (one being a love interest for the main character, and the other likely being best buds' with the main character) to choose from. And usually their magic powers are healing other members of the group, and their fighting power is normally lower then any men in the RPG. The Super Mario games only recently brought back the Princess Toadstool clone; Princess Daisy. This is both because they needed more women in the series (hey they increased the percentage 100%), and just maybe they heard people on the net wanting Luigi and Daisy to be an "item".

OK, there's sexism in video games. And it's not getting THAT much better, I mean the same people who complain there need to be more women in video games also tend to complain Lara Croft has an unhealthy image (like Barbie). Well atleast they got rid of most of the racism that used to be in video games... what, you don't remember that? It was there, often changed and censored... but that's another story